UMPC’s - The quest for the ‘ultimate’ in mobility…

Well first things first - I sold my Acer Tablet C204TMi on Ebay for a rather paltry £570 and i’m now on the market for a UMPC - bit of a shame that I bought the unit for over £1200!
So why did I sell the unit? Or to put it more precisely - why did the device fail me so heavily?

As I began to use the device over the period of leaving Coventry University and settling in to ‘work life’ I probably bought the device a little to late as it would have been great for taking notes in lectures. The primary features I required at the time were that it was powerful enough to carry out fairly demanding tasks such as big applications; play some games (To try and tie off the wound of losing a Geforce 6800 based AMD gaming platform used to fund my resistive digitizer adventure), and of course that ‘wow’ factor of being able to tap on the screen.
All in all, the device was to heavy as a truly ‘mobile’ device, and it’s battery life to short to do anything remotely useful with it. One of the results of this was that the chaps at work didn’t wish to use my device as the weapon of choice for a wireless site survey and chose a (lovely!) IBM 12″ TFT tablet PC instead.

It also became apparent that I didn’t play games really anymore - indicated by the fact that i’m lending my Xbox 360 to a friend as mine had remained unplugged for quite a while. The tablet PC also therefore suffered the same fate and sat collecting dust in a cupboard in my house.
So if i’ve just sold this device then why am I considering a UMPC? I did some serious thinking about what I deem as ‘useful’ mobile technology and what it can do for me, rather than buying a device that can try and cover all bases and generally do it badly!

Come on Ebay! Find me a bargain!

Catch up post!

Wow it’s been ages since I posted up as there’s been lots going on - more info on that to follow! The main reason for posting up is as a few notes about my thoughts on UMPC’s, mobile phones and devices/technology in general that would help me to stay productive. I’ll divide these into multiple posts. I’m guessing largely at the moment i’ll be posting this to just myself - but hopefully someone will read this and comment!

Just as a quick point to note all is well at work and the workload is ever increasing! I’m taking a 20 minute break away from revising for CVoice to write this post!

Busy Busy Busy!

Time to try and study for CCDA as quickly as possible so that when my new books arrive for CCVP I can get on and study. Had a chat with Simon in the office who felt that CCDP was a complete waste of time (This coming from an ex-Cisco employee) so CCNP is still something to seriously look at after doing CCVP! Argh - lots of studying to do.

Other stuff:
- Finally got tickets to Download!!!
- I appear to have become addicted to Facebook
- It’s my birthday soon, and I feel old…
- Off to Brighton, Altrincham, London and Scarborough for work - gah.

Been a jettin'

Howdo folks,

Not many posts as of recent as i’ve been so so busy with customer projects. Managed to get everything installed up in Scotland (300 user phone system) and also off to Nottingham to Demonstrate integration between a DPNSS Siemens/Octel PBX system with a Westell converter and Cisco CallManager. Which was nice…

Other than that hoorah the sun is shining, it’s almost the weekend, and we won at football (15-14, close match!). Oh and there’s talk of a company car soon again which’d be rather nice.
Off to Northampton again tomorrow, then a nice relaxing weekend doing some studying.

Next years love...

…has to be one of these: http://msmobiles.com/news.php/6138.html

Of course i’m just like any other and love my gadgets. However i’m trying my best to figure out a way of getting exactly the phone I want yet trying to find the tariff that suits me. I’m pretty happy with Orange but with T-Mobile offering phones like this it’s hard to ignore them (Plus the £7.50 a month unlimited Internet deal - woohoo I say).

I guess it’s unfortunately down to having two phones though, one for going out on the town (like a Motorola Razr that is just hidden completely) and one of these for work, business trips, car travel (It has GPS!), and a shed load of other things.

I can smell the burning cash already…

The tale of the mysterious DN numbers...

Today i’m having to deal with a bizzarre problem for a customer. They want Outlook Dialling using TAPI. Dead easy!
Or not.

This person who wants Outlook Dialling is finding that 37 CtiParkDevices are appearing in their list of Cisco Lines to Dial from, with DN numbers that don’t exist in CallManager (and never have done!). The icing on the cake is that the SEP line that they’re looking for to do the dialling is not in the list.
If I run Phone.exe (from www.julmar.com/samples) the SEP line appears in the list and therefore demonstrates that: 1) TAPI is installed correctly, 2) All passwords and whatnot are configured correctly, and 3) The customer is not going mad.

WTF. If I fix it i’ll stick it up here.

When the CallManager went Pete Tong...

ARGH.

Well i’m on a customer site and the most bizarre things are happening. Essentially three different engineers have looked at the problem, and spent hours on it, to find that it’s still broken. We found that the Callmanager service was only running on the Subscriber so we kick started this off - but to no avail. Finally after a Publisher restart did the problem go away. However the other site that we added before this one in London is exhibiting the same problem, and wasn’t fixed by the reboot. Very strange…

Essentially it’s a dialling problem to do with picking the right route pattern. Whoever installed the original design in this centralised Callmanager cluster is just an idiot - where logged off phones have the Unrestricted Call search space on them so you can call anywhere from any logged off phone (Toll fraud anyone?), whereas when you log on, that’s where the restrictions come on…

Basically it’s a failed attempt to get the route pattern design correct so that employees can move sites and use the local gateway instead of their own gateway back at ‘home base’ ergo getting cheaper local calls. It’s all a very woolly subject that needs a darn good article writing about it. Watch this space.

Oh and i’m tired of travelling - in London at mo, Scotland Friday. Eurgh.